As has been documented in many studies, most welfare recipients eventually
find jobs, and most do not stay on welfare for long. The challenge for
welfare-to-work programs is to improve on these rates of job finding and
welfare exit by enabling people to find jobs and leave welfare more quickly,
to keep jobs longer and avoid returning to the welfare rolls, or to build
their skills while on welfare and then obtain better jobs. A key task of
evaluations of such programs is to find out what is the "normal" behavior
of welfare recipients over time. Only then is it clear when programs are
producing true benefits for people as opposed to leading to levels of employment,
earnings, and welfare leaving that would have occurred in any case.

Before examining the outcomes for the control groups in depth, this section
opens by briefly summarizing the characteristics of all the adult sample
members in NEWWS before they were randomly assigned to the research groups
(for their average characteristics, see Table 3).
Almost all of them were single women; at the time they entered the study,
they were an average of 30 years old and had an average of two children.
The majority had at least one child under age 6. (In four of the sites, families
could include children as young as age 1; in the other three sites, families
could include children as young as 3.) The racial/ethnic makeup of the samples
varied from site to site, reflecting the local populations.

One of the most important points to take away from this summary is that,
although welfare recipients are a diverse group, a sizeable proportion of
them face one or more barriers to steady employment. Among these barriers
are a lack of a high school diploma or GED, no recent employment, a long
history of welfare receipt, health or emotional problems, a high risk of
depression, and a reluctance to leave one's children to go to work. At study
entry, about two-fifths of the sample members lacked a high school diploma
or GED, having completed an average of slightly less than 10 years of school.
These sample members are often referred to here as nongraduates;
sample members who had at least one of these credentials are referred to
as graduates. A sizeable proportion of people in the sample lacked
a work history, had been on welfare for at least five years cumulatively,
or both. Slightly more than one-quarter of the sample members reported at
study entry that they or a family member had a health or emotional problem.
About one-seventh were found to be at high risk of depression. Finally,
one-quarter of sample members reported strongly preferring staying home with
their children over going to work.

The experiences of the control group members in the NEWWS sites set the standard
against which the program groups' experiences were measured (for the programs'
impacts, see the next sections). Through examination of control group outcomes,
the following portrait of the characteristics, attitudes, and behavior of
welfare recipients who are not subject to welfare-to-work programs emerges.

Most welfare recipients eventually work, but not steadily, and their earnings
are low.

About three-quarters of control group members found jobs during the five-year
follow-up period. But stable employment was uncommon: About three-fourths
of those who found jobs were unemployed by the end of the fourth year, although
most eventually became employed again. Including all control group members
-- that is, averaging in the zero earnings of those who did not work -- the
control groups' average earnings over the five years ranged from $12,752
to $25,566, or about $2,500 to $5,000 a year, across the seven
sites.(1) Looking only at those who were working
at the end of the five years and averaging across all the sites, earnings
in the last quarter were $3,110, or, annualized, about $12,500.

Recipients with a high school diploma or GED earn more than those who
lack this credential.

Control group members who had a high school diploma or GED at study entry
earned an average of $24,196 over five years, whereas people who lacked these
credentials at study entry earned an average of $13,231. It was this general
phenomenon that led designers of FSA to emphasize education in welfare-to-work
programs, in the hope that investments in education would pay off in labor
market outcomes.

The positive relationship between education credentials and earnings does
not prove, however, that more education leads to higher earnings. To distinguish
between correlation and causation, NEWWS examined whether the welfare-to-work
programs that required people to participate in adult education activities
(particularly classes aimed at helping people attain a GED) boosted outcomes
such as attendance in education activities, reading and math literacy skills,
and the rate at which people obtained credentials -- and whether the programs
thereby increased earnings -- by comparing program enrollees' outcomes with
those for people were not subject to any education participation requirement.
The results of this analysis are presented in the third section of this document.

A large majority of welfare recipients leave the welfare rolls within
five years.

By the end of five years, between 17 percent and 37 percent of control group
members across sites were receiving welfare, some of them having remained
on the rolls continuously and others having left and returned. Over the five
years (60 months) of the study's follow-up period, control group members
received welfare for an average of 25 months to 38 months, depending on the
site.

On average, welfare recipients' income is low.

Over the five years, control group members in most sites took in between
$40,000 and $45,000 from earnings, welfare payments, food stamps, and the
Earned Income Credit (EIC) -- a refundable tax credit for low-wage workers
-- minus payroll taxes, or about $8,000 to $9,000 a year. This combined income
typically would have been for a family of three. The proportion of family
income derived from earnings ranged from 30 percent to 45 percent.

A substantial minority of welfare recipients who leave welfare lack health
care coverage five years later.

When they entered NEWWS, virtually all control group members were on welfare
and had Medicaid coverage. Although the majority had health care coverage
at the end of five years, about one-quarter of them did not, suggesting that
many of those who left welfare to work were not able to replace Medicaid
with private coverage once their post-welfare transitional health benefits
expired. Among those who had coverage, most were covered by public programs
such as Medicaid rather than by employer-sponsored or other private plans.
Employment in no way guaranteed health care coverage: Of control group members
who were working at the end of the five years, between 20 percent and 30
percent lacked coverage; of those who had coverage, only about one-third
to one-half obtained it from their employer. Owing to the larger number of
public health programs for low-income children than for low-income adults,
children were somewhat more likely to have coverage than their parents. Still,
about one-fifth of children in the control groups were not covered at the
end of five years.

The majority of welfare recipients enroll themselves in some type of
employment-promoting activity even when they are not required to participate
in a welfare-to-work program.

Most control group members enrolled in vocational training or postsecondary
education at some point during the five years. Few enrolled themselves in
organized job search activities or adult education courses.

A small proportion of single-parent welfare mothers marry or give birth
to another child within five years.

Over the five-year follow-up period, less than one-fifth of single-parent
mothers in the control groups got married, and a similar proportion added
a new baby to their household through birth, marriage, adoption, or foster
care.

About one-fifth of the control group members in NEWWS reported having experienced
some form of domestic abuse during the fifth year of the study period. Much
of this was nonphysical abuse (such as threatening, yelling, or insulting),
but between 7 percent and 14 percent of control group members reported having
experienced recent physical abuse (such as hitting).

The children of welfare recipients do not fare as well on some measures
of well-being as do children in national samples.

Relative to national samples, school-aged children in the NEWWS control groups
were more likely to have repeated a grade or dropped out of school, and younger
children were more likely to have behavior problems and were less cognitively
ready for school. On measures of child health and safety, the children in
the control groups were similar to those in national
samples.(2)

Since the early 1980s, welfare policymakers and program operators have debated
what role adult education -- basic education, GED preparation, and ESL classes
-- should play in welfare-to-work programs. Even under TANF, discussion about
the potential of education to help welfare recipients make the transition
from welfare to work continues. Increasingly, a minimum level of reading
and math skills and the possession of an education credential are seen as
crucial in the current labor market. The concern is centered on welfare
recipients who have no high school diploma or GED, since many policymakers
view having one of these credentials as a prerequisite for entering the work
force. Recipients who have at least one of these credentials are considered
to face far fewer barriers to getting jobs. Furthermore, welfare reform efforts
are focusing on "hard-to-employ" recipients, many of whom have educational
deficits. Finally, in an effort to target scarce resources wisely, there
is great interest in determining who would benefit most from adult education.

The first-order question in this debate, however, is whether participation
mandates can really induce large numbers of welfare recipients -- about one-half
of whom have not finished high school -- to enroll in and attend adult education
classes. More generally, there is the question of whether programs can engage
more people in adult education activities or vocational training than would
participate on their own in any case. The outcomes for the education-focused
programs in NEWWS speak directly to these questions.

It is possible to engage large numbers of welfare recipients in adult
education and -- to a lesser extent, vocational training -- as part of mandatory
welfare-to-work programs.

As shown in Figure 1, during the five-year
follow-up period, 40 percent of enrollees in the three HCD programs participated
for at least one day -- usually much longer -- in adult education activities,
and 28 percent of them participated in vocational training. Participation
rates in adult education were much higher for nongraduates (welfare recipients
who entered the study without a high school diploma or GED) than for graduates
(those who had at least one of these credentials at study entry). In contrast,
participation rates in vocational training were higher for graduates than
for nongraduates.

Impacts on participation -- that is, differences between the program and
control groups' participation rates -- are more common and larger for adult
education than for vocational training.

The HCD programs increased participation in adult education by 20 percentage
points and vocational training by only 5 percentage points. Part of the reason
for the disparity in impacts is that, as shown in
Figure 1, welfare recipients on their own are
somewhat more likely to enroll in vocational training classes than in adult
education, leaving programs less room to increase participation in vocational
training than adult education relative to control group levels. In addition,
many vocational training programs require a high school diploma or GED for
entry, which largely rules out this option for nongraduates. Finally, it
should be kept in mind that the HCD programs generally did not assign people
to college courses.

When people enrolled in adult education as part of a welfare-to-work program,
they spent more than three times as many hours participating as did control
group members. In addition, the programs increased the proportion of welfare
recipients who participated in adult education across a wide variety of subgroups
-- for example, among those with very young children, high school dropouts
who had not completed school beyond the eighth grade, and those who did not
want to go back to school.

Figure 1.
Participation in Education and training over Five Years:
Participation in Adult Education Increased More than Participation in Vocational
Training

SOURCE: Hamilton et al., 2001
NOTE: The participation rates shown are averages for the HCD and control
groups in Atlanta, Grand Rapids, and Riverside

Employment-focused programs generally produce large increases in job search
participation, while education-focused programs usually lead to large increases
in adult education participation.

All the NEWWS programs raised participation relative to control group levels.
Figure 2 shows the participation impacts, split
by type of activity and averaged across programs within each of the four
program types shown in Table 2. The
employment-focused programs increased participation in job search by
approximately 30 percentage points. The education-focused programs -- in
which enrollees were often assigned to job search after education or training
-- also increased job search participation, but to a much lesser degree.
The employment-focused programs were considerably less likely to affect
participation in education and training, and when impacts on participation
in these activities did occur, they were smaller than the education-focused
programs' impacts on job search participation. The Portland program, the
only one that combined an employment focus with a mixed strategy for assigning
recipients to initial activities, substantially increased job search
participation but increased education and training participation as well.
Notably, the participation impacts were comparable across a range of subgroups.
Where the relevant data were available, participation rates for mothers with
young children, for example, were similar to those for mothers with older
children.

Figure 2.
Impacts on participation over Two Years, by Activity and Program Type:
Employment-Focused Programs Produced Large Increases in Job Search
Participation,
and Education-Focused Programs Boosted Adult Education Participation

SOURCE: Freeman et al., 2000
NOTES: Participation impacts were averaged across programs within each program
type.
The Riverside LFA program results include both graduates and nongraduates.
No tests of statistical significance were performed.

1. Throughout this document, ranges are often presented
because specific findings differed from site to site.

2. Parents with a severely ill or disabled child
were generally not mandated to participate in welfare-to-work programs in
the early to mid-1990s; as a result, such families were not included in the
NEWWS samples. Their exclusion, however, is unlikely to have affected the
overall level of assessed health for children in the control groups very
much. Data available in NEWWS suggest that less than 3 percent of the exemptions
from participation were granted owing to children's severe health problems.